To be bold of one’s own: agrarian capitalism and household management in Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred points of good husbandry

This paper argues that early agrarian capitalism in England was followed not by an individualist culture of monetary gain, but rather by a complex mixture of cultural norms stressing profit as well as different forms of community. It examines a popular agricultural manual written by the author Thomas Tusser (1524–1580). The paper shows that through his household management and farming advice, Tusser responded to the challenges resulting from agrarian capitalism not by discarding cultural norms of mutuality and cooperation, but by subtly reinventing them in ways that clashed with the language mobilised by the contemporary agrarian complaint movement.